The University of Southern California on behalf of its Schools of Medicine and Pharmacy and Norris Medical Library seeks the assistance of the National Library of Medicine for a project to offer continuing education and individualized library services to physicians based on specific needs identified in their office practice. The project will develop, implement, and evaluate a relatively "non-invasive" system to study and identify educational needs in drug prescribing patterns of participating physicians and provide informational feedback based on the identified needs. There will be two phases. The first phase develops methods to assess the drug-prescribing patterns of physicians in their offices and to disseminate specific drug information to these physicians to improve their prescribing practices. The second phase will evaluate the effectiveness of the methods developed in terms of change in the prescribing practice of participating physicians. It will also assess the feasibility of continuing the project on a self-sustaining basis after the funding period. By duplicates of prescriptions given in his office practice, the drugs used by each physician will be determined and linked with the problems for which the drugs were prescribed. Each of the participating physicians will be asked to set criteria for the most common drugs that he prescribes. The criteria will include indications, contraindications, toxicity, monitoring points, dosage ranges and therapeutic end points for each of the drugs. The criteria will be reviewed, validated or modified by a faculty committee. The physicians will also be given appropriate medical literature and specific recommendations when there are major differences between their criteria and those modifications by the faculty committee. The physicians will have final approval for the criteria. Once the criteria have been agreed upon by the practicing physicians and faculty, drug usage as it actually occurs will be determined by audit of the duplicate prescriptions and compared with determined criteria. If there is a difference between the stated criteria and actual performance, the physician will be given feedback in terms of specific suggestions from the committee and appropriate medical literature or abstracts. The librarian will be assisted in the selection of the literature by the faculty committee. After this educational experience (Text Truncated - Exceeds Capacity)